1) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a technology for controlling contents to be displayed on an operation panel of an image forming apparatus.
2) Description of the Related Art
Image processing apparatuses in general and image forming apparatuses that carry out an electronic watermarking of embedding watermark information into a scan-input image to reinforce security of the input image in particular are known in the art.
Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2000-115518 discloses an image processing apparatus that prepares in advance a table of plural bit patterns corresponding to a bit 1 or a bit 0 based on the frequency of the appearance of a pixel pattern in a local area of image data. This image processing apparatus then embeds information into the image data and restores the embedded information from the image data using this table.
Electronic watermarking is an extended function of basic functions such as scanning and copying. Therefore, a processing program of the extended function is built into a read only memory (ROM) mounted on an expansion board. When using the extended function, this expansion board is mounted on the image processing apparatus.
In the conventional image processing apparatus, the extended function of the security protection, such as the electronic watermarking, is provided as an optional expansion board. Therefore, on an operation panel, when a screen display of the use of only the basic functions of scanning and copying, and a screen display of the use of both the extended function such as the electronic watermarking and the basic function are the same, a user will be confused and cannot determine whether the extended function is currently mounted.